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 MEMOIRS OF HIMSELF 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
MEMOIRS OF HIMSELF 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Printed from the Original Manuscript 
 in the possession of 
 
 HARRY ELKINS WIDENER 
 
 Philadelphia 
 
 for private distribution only 
 
 1912 
 
.A3 
 
 v.'m-vw tlyft>'y%j(i /y>t.cCe^v 
 
 </"v— 
 
 f 
 
FORTY-FIVE COPIES OF THIS BOOK HAVE 
 BEEN PRINTED ON WHATMAN'S HAND-MADE 
 PAPER FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION ONLY 
 
 No. 15 
 
The life of Robert Louis Stevenson is so well known 
 to his admirers and readers that it hardly seems necessary 
 to give any of the details here. Let it be sufficient to 
 say that he was born in Edinburgh, on November 13th, 
 1850, and died at Apia, Samoa, on December 3d, 1894. 
 
 These recollections of his childhood were written in 
 San Francisco, California, when the author was thirty 
 years of age. The manuscript is written in ink on 
 twenty-three pages of an ordinary quarto blank book, 
 and is full of alterations and corrections. One or two 
 passages have been so inked out that it is impossible to 
 decipher more than a word here and there, and as Stev- 
 enson himself did this, I think it better not to try to 
 decipher them. The manuscript is here printed exactly 
 as it was written. 
 
 While this paper has never been printed in full, 
 references and quotations from it will be found in Mr. 
 Graham Balfour's " Life of Stevenson." In the American 
 edition they occur in Volume I, pp. 40, 41, 49, 53 and 203. 
 
 When I had the manuscript typewritten with the 
 view of printing it I sent copies to Sir Sidney Colvin, 
 Stevenson's literary executor, and Mr. Thomas J. Wise, 
 asking for their opinions and criticisms, and I quote 
 some of their remarks. 
 
 Sir Sidney Colvin says in part: "I quite agree with 
 you as to the interest and importance of this paper. It 
 
 [V] 
 
was not among those handed to me by the family when 
 I was preparing the Edinburgh Edition or I should cer- 
 tainly have printed it with other posthumous fragments 
 in that edition." Further on, regarding Stevenson's 
 criticism of the late Sir W. S. Gilbert, the letter says: 
 "With reference to the fine and very characteristic 
 passage on page 18 of your copy," (see page 26), "it 
 should perhaps be noted that this outburst against the 
 late W. S. Gilbert as a vulgarian would not have repre- 
 sented Stevenson's general opinion of him or his work, 
 but had reference to his trick, in several of his operas, 
 of bringing on an old and ugly woman as a butt for 
 mock love-making by a younger man." 
 
 Mr. Thomas J. Wise, in a letter dated November 5th, 
 1911, writes: "Many thanks indeed for the typed copy of 
 the R. L. S. MS. I have read it with the utmost pleasure. 
 It is a highly important fragment of autobiography, and 
 adds in no small degree to our appreciation of the early 
 environments which served (also in no small degree) to 
 shape and form the character of Stevenson's particular 
 genius. The little paper ought most certainly to pass 
 into print. Its author wrote it with the evident and 
 expressed intention that it should pass into print. You 
 will be doing a signal service to his memory if you carry 
 out the task." 
 
 Mr. Wise, in a later letter, wrote that he had spoken 
 to Dr. Edmund Gosse about the autobiography, and 
 that he had expressed a desire to read it. Mr. Wise 
 lent him the paper, which he returned with the following 
 letter which Mr. Wise has kindly sent to me to keep 
 with the manuscript: 
 
 " I have now read the chapter of R. L. S. on his child- 
 hood with great emotion. It is a noble fragment, written 
 when his style was at the height of its early freshness. 
 
 [81 
 
I am very much obliged to you for letting me see so 
 splendid a piece of literatum. It is certainly the most 
 valuable new piece of R. L. S. which has been produced 
 since his death." 
 
 These letters seem to be all the introduction needed 
 for the little paper, but in conclusion I wish to thank 
 Sir Sidney Colvin, Mr, Thomas J. Wise, Dr. Edmund 
 Gosse, for their valuable criticism, and Mr. Ellis Ames 
 Ballard for several kind suggestions. My thanks are 
 also due to Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach for his kind assistance 
 in helping me prepare the paper, and to Mr, Luther S. 
 Livingston, who procured the manuscript for me. 
 
 H. E. W. 
 January, 1912, 
 
 [9] 
 
MEMOIRS OF HIMSELF 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 Book I — Childhood. 
 
 Given to Isobel Stewart Strong 
 The Amanuensis 
 
 For Future Use When the Under- 
 writer IS Dead 
 
 With Love 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
I have the more interest in beginning these memoirs 
 where and how I do, because I am living absolutely alone 
 in San Francisco, and because from two years of anxiety 
 and, according to the doctors, a touch of malaria, I may 
 say I am altogether changed into another character. 
 After weeks in this city, I know only a few neighbouring 
 streets; I seem to be cured of all my adventurous whims 
 and even of human curiosity; and am content to sit 
 here by the fire and await the course of fortune. Indeed 
 I know myself no longer; and as I am changed in heart, 
 I hope I have the more chance to look back impartially 
 on all that has come and gone heretofore. 
 
 There is, after all, no truer sort of writing than what 
 is to be found in autobiographies, and certainly none 
 more entertaining. Or if any, it is in fiction of the 
 higher class which is the quintessence and last word 
 both of veracity and entertainment. A man is perhaps 
 not very sure of his taste in matters that concern him 
 so nearly as the facts of his own career; he is not perhaps 
 in a position to expand or broider; but where can he 
 have so fine an opportunity of condensation? I shall 
 try here to be very dense and only to touch on what con- 
 cerned me very deeply; for, as I am after all a man, that 
 must be to some degree the concern of mankind. 
 
 It has been a question with me whether it could ever 
 be worth while to write the lives of any that were not 
 heroic ; but a recollection of my own youth has sufficiently 
 laid the scruple. This life of ours is at best so mixed 
 a business, that between good and evil, between sense 
 and folly, between the selfish and the generous impulse, 
 
 [13] 
 
we must always be glad to find ourselves countenanced 
 and, as it were, brothered by a fellow man; and where 
 a life, low as it may be, has any upward tendency and 
 does not progressively condescend with the baser parts 
 of nature, if it be truly told, it may not only console but 
 encourage others. Even where there is no human dignity, 
 there will be some human pathos; even when no great 
 right has been done, and the being under review has 
 merely struggled along the border land of good and evil 
 with conspicuous lapses, that struggle itself is something 
 holy. I suppose I am in agreement with the very best 
 of men, when I say that I should wish, if I could live 
 again, to change at least three quarters of my thoughts 
 and actions; and still, in company with the worst, I 
 have moments in my experience upon which I can look 
 back with unmingled satisfaction. 
 
 Jan: 19} 
 
 ' This must have been Jan. '80, he did not go to America till autumn 1879. 
 M. I. S. 1894. [This note is in his mother's autograph.] 
 
 [14] 
 
BOOK I— CHILDHOOD. 
 
 I was born in Edinburgh, in 1850, the 13th of Novem- 
 ber, my father Thomas Stevenson, my mother Margaret 
 Isabella Balfour, My mother's family, the Balfours of 
 Pilrig, is a good provincial stock; for near three cen- 
 turies before my appearance, these Balfours had been 
 judges, advocates and ministers of the gospel, and I 
 believe them related to many of the so-called good 
 families of Scotland. The present laird, John Balfour, 
 has made out the family tree, but I have never had the 
 curiosity to see it. It concerns me much more that 
 John Balfour of Kinlock, the covenanting fanatic, was 
 an ancestral cousin; and that Dr. Smith of Galston — 
 "Smith opens out his cauld harangues" — was my mother's 
 maternal grandfather. Thus I may call myself connected 
 both with Scott and Burns. X^. 
 
 My father's family is much more remarkable; this 
 much at least may be said for it, that its history is un- 
 paralleled. My father heard a tradition that the first 
 of his race came from France as Barber-chirurgeon to 
 Cardinal Beaton; but there is small reason to doubt 
 that we Stevensons are of Scandinavian descent. I wish 
 I could prove we were related to old John Stevenson, 
 author of the "Rare soul-strengthening and comforting 
 Cordial"^; and at least, so dark is the family history, 
 I am at liberty to tell myself it may have been so. We 
 
 ' Old Robert Wodrow too, of the inimitable Analecta is my relation through 
 the Balfours. 
 
 * Celtic, my dear? 
 
 [15] 
 
 MBMHHilHk 
 
rose out of obscurity in a clap. My father and Uncle 
 David made the third generation, one Smith and two 
 Stevenson, of direct descendants who had been engineers 
 to the Board of Northern Lights; there is scarce a deep 
 sea light from the Isle of Man north about to Berwick, 
 but one of my blood designed it; and I have often 
 thought that to find a family to compare with ours in 
 the promise of immortal memory, we must go back to 
 the Egyptian Pharaohs: — upon so many reefs and fore- 
 lands that not very elegant name of Stevenson is engraved 
 with a pen of iron upon granite. My name is well known 
 as that of the Duke of Argyle among the fishers, the 
 skippers, the seamen and the masons of my native land. 
 Whenever I smell salt water, I Icnow I am not far from 
 one of the works of my ancestors. The Bell Rock stands 
 monument for my grandfather ; the Skerry Vohr for my 
 Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown 
 along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they 
 burn more brightly for the genius of my father. 
 
 I was an only child and, it may be in consequence, 
 both intelligent and sickly. I have three powerful im- 
 pressions of my childhood: my sufferings when I was 
 sick, my delights in convalescence at my grandfather's 
 manse of Colinton, near Edinburgh, and the unnatural 
 activity of my mind after I was in bed at night. As to 
 the first, I suppose it generally granted that none suffer 
 like children from physical distress. We learn, as we 
 grow older, a sort of courage under pain which mar- 
 velously lightens the endurance; we have made up our 
 mind to its existence as a part of life; but the spirit of 
 the child is filled with dismay and indignation, and these 
 pangs of the mind are often little less intolerable than the 
 physical distress that caused them. My recollection of 
 the long nights when I was kept awake by coughing are 
 only relieved by the thought of the tenderness of my 
 nurse and second mother (for my first will not be jealous) 
 Alison Cunningham. She was more patient than I can 
 
 [16] 
 
suppose of an angel; hours together she would help and 
 console me in my paroxysms ; and I remember with par- 
 ticular distinctness, how she would lift me out of bed, 
 and take me, rolled in blankets, to the window, whence 
 I might look forth into the blue night starred with 
 street-lamps, and see where the gas still burned behind 
 the windows of other sickrooms. These were feverish, 
 melancholy times; I cannot remember to have raised 
 my head or seen the moon or any of the heavenly bodies ; 
 my eyes were turned downward to the broad lamplit 
 streets, and to where the trees of the garden rustled 
 together all night in undecipherable blackness; yet the 
 sight of the outer world refreshed and cheered me; and 
 the whole sorrow and burden of the night was at an end 
 with the arrival of the first of that long string of country 
 carts that, in the dark hours of the morning, with the 
 neighing of horses, the cracking of whips, the shouts of 
 drivers and a hundred other wholesome noises, creaked, 
 rolled, and pounded past my window. 
 
 I suffered, at other times, from the most hideous night- 
 mares, which would wake me screaming and in the ex- 
 tremest frenzy of terror. On such occasions, none could 
 pacify my nerves but my good father, who would rise 
 from his own bed and sit by mine, full of childish talk 
 and reproducing aimless conversations with the guard 
 or the driver of a mail coach, until he had my mind dis- 
 engaged from the causes of my panic. These were some- 
 times very strange; one that I remember seems to indi- 
 cate a considerable force of imagination: I dreamed I 
 was to swallow the world: and the terror of the fancy 
 arose from the complete conception I had of the hugeness 
 and populousness of our sphere. Disproportion and a 
 peculiar shade of brown, something like that of sealskin, 
 haunted me particularly during these visitations. 
 
 I have not space to tell of my pleasures at the manse. 
 I have been happier since; for I think most people exag- 
 gerate the capacity for happiness of a child; but I have 
 
 [17] ^ 
 
 -" — " 
 
never again been happy in the same way. For indeed it 
 was scarce a happiness of this world, as we conceive it 
 when we are grown up, and was more akin to that of an 
 animal than to that of a man. The sense of sunshine, 
 of green leaves, and of the singing of birds, seems never 
 to have been so strong in me as in that place. The 
 deodar upon the lawn, the laurel thickets, the mills, the 
 river, the church bell, the sight of people ploughing, the 
 Indian curiosities with which my uncles had stocked the 
 house, the sharp contrast between this place and the 
 city where I spent the other portion of my time, all these 
 took hold of me, and still remain upon my memory, with 
 a peculiar sparkle and sensuous excitement. I have 
 somewhere part of a long paper ^ on my solitary pleasures 
 about the manse and garden; but I could write volumes 
 and never be done; so clear, telling and memorable were 
 my impressions. 
 
 It is odd, after so long an interval, to recall those 
 incidents that struck me deepest. Once as I lay, playing 
 hunter, hid in a thick laurel, and with a toy gun upon 
 my arm, I worked myself so hotly into the spirit of my 
 play, that I think I can still see the herd of antelope 
 come sweeping down the lawn and round the deodar; 
 it was almost a vision. Again, one warm summer even- 
 ing on the front green, my aunt showed me the wing-bone 
 of an albatross, told me of its largeness and how it slept 
 upon the wing above the vast Pacific, and quoted from 
 the "Ancient Mariner": 
 
 "With my cross bow, 
 I shot the Albatross." 
 
 I do not believe anything so profoundly affected my 
 imagination; and to this day, I am still faithful to the 
 Albatross, as the most romantic creature of fable (or 
 nature, I know not which), and the one, besides, that 
 
 * Memories and Portraits, 1887. The Manse, page 106. Is this the paper 
 referred to ? 
 
 [18] 
 
has the noblest name. I remember in particular, a view 
 I had from an attic window, suddenly beholding, with 
 delighted wonder, my ordinary playgrounds at my feet; 
 and another outlook, when I climbed a hawthorn near 
 the gate, and saw over the wall upon the snuff-mill 
 garden, thick with flowers and bright with sunshine, a 
 paradise not hitherto suspected. 
 
 My grandfather, the noblest looking old man I have 
 ever seen, was one of the last, I suppose, to speak broad 
 Scotch and be a gentleman; he did not, however, do so 
 in his sermons; which were in English and pretty dry, 
 I fancy. I remember showing him my soldiers one day 
 after dinner, as he sat over his daily nuts and port; he 
 told me to play at the battle of Coburg, which gave me 
 a great sense of his antiquity, as I had never heard of 
 that engagement. I chanced to be in the house when he 
 was taken with his last sickness, and was packed home 
 again to be out of the way. He was up, and trying to 
 write letters, an hour or so before he died; so that I 
 think we may say he died young, although he was eighty.^ 
 I shall not forget my last sight of him, the morning ere 
 I left. He was pale and his eyes were to me, somewhat 
 appallingly blood-shot. He had a dose of Gregory's 
 mixture administered and then a barley sugar drop to 
 take the taste away; but when my aunt wished to give 
 one of the drops to me, the rigid old gentleman inter- 
 fered: No Gregory's mixture, no barley sugar, said he. 
 I feel with a pang, that it is better he is dead for my 
 sake; if he still see me, it is out of a clearer place than 
 any earthly situation, whence he may make allowances 
 and consider both sides. But had he lived in the flesh, 
 he would have suffered perhaps as much from what I 
 think my virtues as from what I acknowledge to be my 
 faults. Thus we may be reconciled to the passing away 
 of the aged, that it leaves a field for youth. 
 
 * In the manuscript the word "three" has been inserted after "eighty" in 
 a different hand, making his grandfather eighty-three when he died. 
 
 [19] 
 
I have mentioned my aunt. In her youth she was 
 a wit and a beauty, very imperious, managing, and self 
 sufficient. But as she grew up she began to suffice for 
 all the family as well. An accident on horseback, she 
 says, but I have heard it was a natural cause, made her 
 nearly deaf and blind, and suddenly transformed this 
 wilful Empress into the most serviceable and amiable 
 of women and the family maid of all work. There were 
 thirteen of the Balfours, as (oddly enough) there were of 
 the Stevensons also ; and the children of the family came 
 home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered, 
 from the infanticidal climate of India. There must 
 sometimes have been half a score of us children about 
 the Manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt 
 Jane's tenderness. It was strange when a new party of 
 these sallow young folk came home, perhaps with an 
 Indian ayah. This little country manse was a centre 
 of the world: and Aunt Jane represented charity. The 
 text, my mother says, must have been written for her 
 and Aunt Jane : more are the children of the barren than 
 the children of the married wife. 
 
 We children had naturally many plays together; I 
 usually insisted on the lead, and was invariably exhausted 
 to death by evening. One day of such happy excitement 
 was often followed by two or three in bed with a fever — 
 furia scozzese. 
 
 But the time when my mind displayed most activity 
 was after I was put to bed and before I fell asleep. I 
 remember these periods more distinctly and I believe 
 further back than any other part of my childhood. I 
 would lie awake declaiming aloud to myself my views 
 of the universe, in something that I called singing although 
 I have no ear and in a measure of my own although at 
 that time I can have known nothing of verse. One of 
 these Songstries, for so I named my evening exercises, 
 was taken down by my father from behind the door, and 
 I have seen it within the last few years. It dealt sum- 
 
 [20] 
 
marily with the Fall of Man, taking a view most inimical 
 to Satan; but what is truly odd, it fell into a loose, 
 irregular measure with a tendency toward the ten- 
 syllable heroic line. This, as I am sure I can then have 
 heard little or nothing but hymn meters, seems to show 
 a leaning in the very constitution of the language to that 
 form of verse; or was it but a trick of the ear, inherited 
 from 18th Century ancestors? It was certainly marked 
 when taken in connection with my high-strung religious 
 ecstasies and terrors. It is to my nurse that I owe these 
 last: my mother was shocked when, in days long after, 
 she heard what I had suffered. I would not only lie 
 awake to weep for Jesus, which I have done many a time, 
 but I would fear to trust myself to slumber lest I was not 
 accepted and should slip, ere I awoke, into eternal ruin. 
 I remember repeatedly, although this was later on and 
 in the new house, waking from a dream of Hell, clinging 
 to the horizontal bar of the bed, with my knees and 
 chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed, with 
 agony. It is not a pleasant subject. I piped and 
 snivelled over the Bible, with an earnestness that had 
 been talked into me. I would say nothing without 
 adding "If I am spared," as though to disarm fate by 
 a show of submission; and some of this feeling still 
 remains upon me in my thirtieth year.^ I shook my 
 numskull over the spiritual welfare of my parents, be- 
 cause they gave dinner parties and played cards, things 
 condemned in the religious biographies on which my 
 mind was fed; and once, for a crowning point, I turned 
 the tables on my nurse herself. She was reading aloud 
 to me from Cassell's Family Paper a story called The 
 Soldier of Fortune; "^ it was about the Crimean War, 
 then lately ended; and from some superfluity of love 
 affairs, Cummy, (so I called my nurse) had expressed 
 
 * This I think proves Mrs. Stevenson's statement that the paper was written 
 in 1880 and not 1879, as Stevenson has dated the Introduction. 
 
 ' This story by the author of "Stanfield Hall" appeared in 1855. Chapter 
 I is in the issue of April 14th and Chapter 79 (the last) in that of December 29th. 
 
 [21] 
 
 ^^^^^ 
 
some fear lest it should turn out "a regular novel." 
 That night I had a pain in my side which frightened me; 
 I began to see Hell pretty clear, and cast about for any 
 sin of which this might be punishment; and The Soldier 
 of Fortune occurred to me as my leading " worldliness " 
 of the moment. I foreswore it then and there; and next 
 morning announced and uprightly held to my vow. So 
 instead of something healthy about battles, I continued 
 to have my mind defiled with Brainerd, M'Cheyne, and 
 Mrs. Winslow, and a whole crowd of dismal and morbid 
 devotees. I speak with measure; knowing these were 
 admirable people. But I have never wished to be good 
 in their way; nor, if that were the way of the majority, 
 can I suppose that this world would be either good or 
 kind or pleasant; and for a child, their utterances are 
 truly poisonous. The life of Brainerd, for instance, my 
 mother had the sense to forbid, when we were some way 
 through it. God help the poor little hearts who are thus 
 early plunged among the breakers of the spirit! They 
 should dwell by shallow, sunny waters, plucking the 
 lilies of optimism; but to go down into the great deep 
 is not for these unused and trembling sailors. 
 
 When at night my mind was disengaged from either 
 of these extremes, and there was no high wind, for I 
 always hated and do still bitterly hate the noise of a 
 storm about a house, I told myself romances in which 
 I played the hero. Now and then the subject would be 
 the animation of my play things; but usually these fan- 
 tasies embraced the adventures of a lifetime, full of far 
 journeys and Homeric battles. I note these peculiarities. 
 They had no reference to religion; although that filled 
 my mind so greatly at other moments. I was a pure 
 old pagan when I came to practice. Secondly, for as far 
 back as I can remember, they bore always some relation 
 to women, and Eros and Anteros must have almost 
 equally divided my allegiance. And lastly they would 
 be concluded always with a heroic, and sometimes 
 
 [22] 
 
with a cruel, death. I never left myself till I was 
 dead. 
 
 When I was five years of age, my cousin Robert Alan 
 Stevenson, came to stay at my father's house; he was 
 three years older than I, an imaginative child who had 
 lived in a dream with his sisters, his parents, and the 
 Arabian Nights, and more unfitted for the world, as 
 was shown in the event, than an angel fresh from heaven. 
 I shall speak of him some day more at length on his own 
 account; but just now I have to do with myself and only 
 mention others as they touched and moulded my char- 
 acter. We lived together in a purely visionary state. 
 We had countries; his was Nosingtonia, mine Encyclo- 
 pedia; where we ruled and made wars and inventions, 
 and of which we were perpetually drawing maps. His 
 was shaped a little like Ireland; mine lay diagonally 
 across the paper like a large tip-cat. We were never 
 weary of dressing up. We drew, we coloured our pic- 
 tures; we painted and cut out the figures for a paste- 
 board theatre; this last one of the dearest pleasures of 
 my childhood, and one I was so loath to relinquish, that 
 I followed it in secret till I must have been fifteen. This 
 visit of Bob's was altogether a great holiday in my life. 
 
 Incidentally, too, I was then introduced to literature. 
 My uncle, David Stevenson, offered a prize of £1 to the 
 best History of Moses from any of us Stevenson cousins. 
 My history was, of course, dictated; and from that day 
 forth, I would always be dictating whenever I could 
 command a pen. The History of Moses was copiously 
 illustrated by the author in a very free style. In these 
 pictures, each Israelite was represented with a pipe in 
 his mouth, cheering the desert miles. I was, indeed, 
 always drawing; but it was from a purely imitative and 
 literary impulse. I never drew from nature, nor even 
 from a copy; but broidered away at my fancies in a 
 spirit the reverse of the artistic. It is told of me that 
 I came once to my mother with these words: "Mama, 
 
 [23] 
 
I have drawed a man's body; shall I draw his soul now?" 
 And this shows how early I was at it, and how I merely 
 used it as a language with no thought of exact form or 
 plastic beauty. Not so much a quickness to draw, as 
 an intensity of looking, should mark the youth of the 
 true painter. 
 
 I learned to read when I was seven, looking over the 
 pictures in illustrated papers while recovering from a 
 gastric fever. It was thus done at a blow; all previous 
 efforts to teach me having been defeated by my active 
 idleness and remarkable inconsequence of mind. The 
 same fever is remarkable to me for another reason: one 
 of my little cousins (D. A. S.) having sent me a letter 
 every day. This was a kindness that I shall never forget 
 till the day of my death; though I see little of him now, 
 and cannot think he much affects me. I have an in- 
 credible, smothered warmth of affection towards him in 
 my heart. As he will probably outlive me, I hope he 
 may see these words and take the thanks I have been 
 always too shy to renew to him in person. 
 
 On the whole I have not much joy in remembering 
 these early years. I was as much an egotist as I have 
 ever been; I had a feverish desire of consideration; I 
 was ready to lie, although more often wrongly accused of 
 it, or rather wrongfully punished for it, having lied un- 
 consciously; I was sentimental, snivelling, goody, mor- 
 bidly religious. I hope and do believe I am a better 
 man than I was a child. With my respects to Words- 
 worth. 
 
 I was lovingly, but not always wisely treated, the 
 great fault being Cummy's overhaste to make me a 
 religious pattern. I have touched already on the cruelty 
 of bringing a child among the awful shadows of man's 
 life; but it must not be forgotten, it is also unwise, and 
 a good way to defeat the educator's purpose. The idea 
 of sin, attached to particular actions absolutely, far from 
 repelling, soon exerts an attraction on young minds. 
 
 [241 
 
Probably few over-pious children have not been tempted, 
 sometime or other and by way of dire experiment, to 
 deny God in set terms. The horror of the act, performed 
 in solitude, under the blue sky; the smallness of the 
 voice uttered in the stillness of noon; the panic flight 
 from the scene of the bravado: all these will not have 
 been forgotten. But the worst consequence is the 
 romance conferred on doubtful actions; until the child 
 grows to think nothing more glorious, than to be struck 
 dead in the very act of some surprising wickedness. 
 I can never again take so much interest in anything, as 
 I took, in childhood, in doing for its own sake what I 
 believed to be sinful. And generally, the principal effect 
 of this false, common doctrine of sin, is to put a point on 
 lust. The true doctrine has a very different influence, 
 but had best be taught to children in particular instances, 
 and under the general routine of kindness and unkindness. 
 Had I died in these years, I fancy I might perhaps 
 have figured in a tract. I have been sometimes led to 
 wonder if all the young saints of whom I have read and 
 meditated with enthusiasm in my early periods, suffered, 
 from their biographers the same sort of kindly violence, 
 or had idealized themselves by the same simply necessary 
 suppressions, that would have fitted myself and my 
 career for that gallery of worthies. In the case of the 
 infantile saint, the devil's advocate is silent. The 
 aspirations have not yet been brought to the touch of 
 practice; the personal is still potential; saint and prig 
 and coward are still not to be distinguished. Yet, in 
 my case and with all my evil on my head, it is yet true 
 there was something of the saintly. Not because I wept 
 over the Saviour's agony; not because I could repeat, 
 with some appropriate inflections, a psalm or two or 
 the story of the Shumanite's son; but because I had a 
 great fund of simplicity, believed all things and the good 
 rather than the evil, was very prone to love and inac- 
 cessible to hatred, and never failed in gratitude for any 
 
 [25] 
 
benefit I had the wit to understand. The sight of de- 
 formed persons and above all of hideous old women 
 moved in me a sort of panic horror; yet I can well recall 
 with what natural courtesy I strove to conceal my dis- 
 affection. Fairy, the hunchback druggist of Bridge of 
 Allan, was a terror to me by day and haunted my dreams 
 at night; but my pity was stronger than my distaste; 
 and I made it a point to command myself and speak to 
 him with a child's friendliness, whenever the poor vain 
 man, little understanding what was in my heart, con- 
 descended to address me. There was an old woman, 
 Annie Torrence, who helped at the washing I believe; 
 an inhuman, bearded spectre, with a human heart in 
 spite of all; who made it her business to be kind to me 
 and show off before me, singing "It's all round my hat 
 for a twelvemonth and a day" with witchlike steps and 
 gestures, backing to and fro before me, the horrified 
 and fascinated child. Out of my dreams, I have never 
 feared so cordially any other phenomenon as this of 
 Annie Torrence and her song; for I thought the song to 
 be hers and to commemorate some romance of her so-long 
 departed youth. Yet I know I was ever consciously 
 busy in my own small and troubled soul, to bear a good 
 face before this dismal entertainment and conceal from 
 the old woman the disastrous effect she was producing. 
 I think I was born with a sense of what is due to age ; for 
 the more I interrogate my recollections the more traces do 
 I find of that respect struggling with the dislike of what 
 is old and then seemed to me to be ugly. Of all the 
 cruel things in life, the cruellest, it may be, is the departure 
 of all beauty from those who have been the desired 
 mothers and mistresses of men in a former generation. 
 Pagans like Horace, devils like Villon — and yet he was 
 a devil with a dash of the angelic, were it only in his 
 wings — and simple crass vulgarians, like Gilbert, so much 
 worse than the worst of the devilish, — take an oppor- 
 tunity for some cheap effect of art from these distressing 
 
 [26] 
 
changes. I thank God, when I was a child I knew a 
 higher decency. A man should have never been suckled 
 at a woman's bosom, he should never have slept in a 
 woman's embrace, he should never have known, in the 
 most passing manner, the pleasures of a woman's affec- 
 tion or the support of a woman's tenderness, so far to 
 forget what is honourable in sentiment, what is essential 
 in gratitude, or what is tolerable by other men. 
 
 To finish this matter, I must tell a story which 
 illustrates the best of me and is, at the same time, piti- 
 fully comical. In Howe Street, round the corner from 
 our house, I often saw a lame boy of rather a rough and 
 poor appearance. He had one leg much shorter than 
 the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, like 
 a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in 
 tracts and goody story books, of the isolation of the 
 infirm ; and after many days of bashfulness and hours of 
 consideration, I finally accosted him, sheepishly enough 
 I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to play with 
 me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly 
 like a speech from one of the goody books that had 
 nerved me to the venture. But the answer was not the 
 one I had anticipated, for it was a blast of oaths. I need 
 not say how fast I fled. This incident was the more 
 to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate 
 aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we 
 had got into talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. 
 The last particular may still be recognized. About four 
 years ago, I saw my lame lad, and knew him again at 
 once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling 
 along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's 
 basket on his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to 
 him, but it was a great affair to me. 
 
 FINIS 
 
 [27] 
 
H 221 85«<i 
 
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